If viewers thought Democrats might tuck in their tails and run away from the president’s record, they were mistaken. The speakers gave full-throated, bare-fanged defenses of Barack Obama — rattling off hours of his accomplishments — and they used that record to draw a stark distinction with the plans of Mitt Romney, whom they attacked with unfettered ferocity.

The Democrats came to the party ready for a fight.

If you had to sum it up in a word, it would probably be defiance, as in defying the polls, defying the pundits and defying some harsh political realities.

The energetic and consistent speeches — all a variation on the theme of an already present and still-growing America that the Republicans are willfully and possibly even congenitally blind to — ran counter to tight polls, the “enthusiasm-gap” hawks of cable news and a still-struggling economy.

As Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, told the crowd Tuesday:

My message is this — it is time for Democrats to grow a backbone and stand up for what we believe. Quit waiting – quit waiting, quit waiting for pundits or polls or super PACs to tell us who the next president or senator or congressman will be. We are Americans. We shape our own future.

To soften the first night it took the first lady, who, in dulcet tones but to devastating effect, delivered an exquisitely crafted speech that linked her personal love for her husband to devout Democrats’ endless love affair with both of them. And her speech did something that Ann Romney’s failed to do: it gave listeners an inside look at how her husband approached problems and worked through them.

One criticism of Obama, even among many supporters, is that he can sometimes seem detached. The first lady painted a portrait of a man who is empathetic and engaged. The crowd swooned.

Wednesday was a little more uneven and a little less well-scripted, but the masterful Bill Clinton wrapped the evening up as only he could: delivering a wonky speech with the passion of a Southern preacher and keeping the crowd rapt the whole way through.

“I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside,” Clinton said near the beginning of his speech, and by the end he was arguing starkly that

when we vote in this election, we’ll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in. If you want a winner-take-all, you’re-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we’re-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Whatever Clinton’s faults, oration is his gift. No speaker at the Republican National Convention even came close.

It’s not clear if the Democrats’ performance will win converts — on Tuesday Gallup reported that there was no bounce in the polls for Romney after his convention — but their speeches may well stiffen loyalists’ spines. In an evenly divided election where a win or a loss may come down to mobilization and turnout, that’s not nothing.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.